Happy new year! Here’s a post that I certainly did not expect to crest 1,400 words.

There have been a rash of recent news stories from Brittany, the westernmost region of mainland France, concerning parents wishing to give their children traditional Breton names. In September 2017, for example, Agence France-Presse published an account of a baby boy named “Fañch” whose parents were told that per government rules their son could not have a tilde in his name. As the French government’s website explains,

[The alphabet used must be the one used for writing French. Alphabetic characters that are not used in the French language are therefore not allowed (e.g. “ñ”).]

“Fañch” is the regional equivalent of the French “François” or the English “Francis”, and although it is a Breton name rather than a French one, it is by no means unusual. There are prominent Breton writers named Fañch Peru and Fañch Broudig, for example, and so the parents of young Fañch Bernard were understandably upset when their choice of name was rejected. The boy’s father, Jean-Christophe, vowed that “He will have his tilde, that’s for sure”, and AFP reported that he plans to appeal the ruling.

Then, only a week or so ago, I came across a similar report from thelocal.fr, this time claiming that a different Breton couple has been told that they cannot christen their son “Derc’hen” — again, another traditional Breton name — for the same reason. First tildes, now apostrophes: does Brittany have a problem with its native tongue? Does France have a problem with the Breton language? Now, I’m no more than an armchair Francophile, but if I was to hazard a guess then I’d say the answer to both questions is yes. And also no. It’s complicated.

France’s passionate and sporadically vexed relationship with its mother tongue is best seen in the existence of the Académie française. Founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu,2 this state-sponsored body is emblematic of the French establishment’s fiercely protective attitude towards its, well, lingua franca, and, as such, it has held firmly to the tiller of French grammar and usage for more than three centuries. Fittingly for such a durable institution, its members are called les immortels after the Académie’s motto, ‎À l’immortalité, or “to immortality”. The larger part of the Académie’s duty to defend the French language takes the form of a dictionary that attempts to replace commonly-used foreign terms such as “weekend”, “email” and “podcast” with neologisms such as fin de semaine, courriel and diffusion pour baladeur. This last term translates directly as “broadcast for walkman”; little wonder the Académie is sometimes accused of being behind the times.3

Beyond its lexicographic work, the Académie issues official statements whenever linguistic evolution takes a notable turn — which, more often than not, is in a direction that les immortels do not especially like. Given that its membership is and has always been conspicuously male, pale and stale, this happens rather a lot these days. As an example, when, in 1998, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin directed that women serving on his cabinet should be referred to as the feminine la ministre rather than the more conventional le ministre, the Académie’s president called an emergency meeting to discuss this assault on the French language.4 More recently, the proposed use of bullets to formulate gender-inclusive terms such as étudiant·e·s to mean a group of students with both male and female members, where ordinarily the masculine étudiants would take precedence over the feminine étudiantes, led the Académie to brand the move a “mortal danger” to the French language.5 With immortality comes a certain ossification of viewpoint, it would seem.

France’s hands-on approach to its language extends far beyond the Académie’s ivory towers. In 1990, a different quango called the Conseil supérieur de la langue française (the CSLF, or Superior Council on the French Language) published guidelines for a spelling reform affecting about 2,400 words such as oignon (onion), now to be spelled ognon to better match its pronunciation; paraître (to appear),* which was to be shorn of its silent circumflex; porte-monnaie (wallet), whose hyphen was to be dropped, and so on.6 The reforms attracted little notice at the time but in 2016, when the changes were finally adopted by educational publishers, there was a general and predictable outcry.7 Ironically, by this time the CSLF had been abolished8 and so the French media turned its accusatory gaze on the Académie française. For once entirely innocent, the Académie found itself in the unique position of having to tamp down a linguistic controversy rather than fan its flames.9

Then there are France’s naming laws.

From the French Revolution on, under choix du prénom (choice of first name) rules parents had to choose from a list of prescribed names when christening their children. The law was not always perfectly applied (Le Parisien reports that a “Sue Ellen” sneaked through the net in 1986, when American soap opera Dallas was at its height), but it nevertheless placed considerable constraints on how children could be named.† Having finally been struck off the books in 1993, parents can now choose essentially any name they like as long as the registrar is happy that it will not unduly harm the child.1

And yet, there remains one final consideration: that the only alphabetic characters allowed in names are those used in the French language itself. In Brittany, this is a problem.

The Breton language is emphatically not French. It’s a Celtic language, related closely to Cornish and more distantly to Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, and was first exported to the northwest coast of France by Britons who emigrated there in the 5th and 6th centuries.10‡ As with those other languages, Breton has not always had a smooth relationship with its host country; notably, it was only in 2008 that France’s constitution was amended to give equal status to regional languages such as Alsatian, Breton, and Corsican. Naturally, the Académie française bemoaned the announcement even as Breton cultural leaders rejoiced. British newspaper The Telegraph quoted one Per Vari Kerloc’h, a Breton druid, who took the opportunity to twist the knife a little:

Kerloc’h, the leader of the Gorsedd of Breton Druids, which champions Breton and Cornish culture, insisted the changes were fully compatible with the nation’s distinguished past. […] “Unlike today’s members of the L’Académie Française [sic], many great French writers admitted that regional languages and cultures were part of France’s heritage,” he said.12

The Telegraph did not mention whether Kerloc’h’s apostrophe exists in the officially-recorded version of his name, but it must have given les immortels palpitations all the same.

All this brings us back to 2018 and to Fañch and Derc’hen — and it explains, to a degree, why their names caused the local registrars such consternation. Those who read, write or speak minority languages often do not have the easiest of times using government services, and France’s naming rules, still adrift from the constitution’s more equitable position, are a case in point.

At last, though, things may be changing for the better. Just a few days ago, the public prosecutor of Rennes, where Derc’hen’s parents registered his birth, announced that the boy will be allowed to keep his apostrophe. Referring to the 2014 Ministry of Justice bulletin that had codified the ban on non-French characters,13 Jean-François Thony explained that although the standard French accents (é, è and ê), the diaeresis (ë) and the cedilla (ç) were definitively allowed, nowhere were marks of punctuation explicitly banned.14

For the parents of Fañch Bernard, however, things are as yet unresolved. The same 2014 circular that lets Derc’hen’s apostrophe slip through the net is quite clear on the status of other marks:

[Any other diacritical sign attached to a letter or ligature cannot be used for the establishment of a civil status document.]

As far as the French state is concerned, the Breton ñ is still forbidden. Fañch’s parents will get their day in court — Le Monde reports that their appeal will be heard at some point in 2018 — but for now, it seems that France is not quite ready to embrace all its languages equally.

The year is coming to an end and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for me to promote my books!

I’m kidding. Sort of, at least. Fatherhood has occupied most of the time that, in previousyears, I would have spent hunting down punctuation-related gifts for you, the discerning reader. That said, I’ve been interested in the comings and goings surrounding emoji (“picture writing”, or symbols like “😊” and “🎁”) for some time now, and in doing so I came across Josh Williams’ pleasingly minimal “Unicalendar” for the year 2018.

At 12″ by 24″, Williams’ letterpress calendar carries the entirety of 2018 on a single sheet and comes with set of adhesive foil emoji stickers with which to mark significant dates. I’d say that it would make a great gift for a typographically-minded friend or family member, but given that Williams is printing a limited edition of only 200 copies, maybe you’d prefer to get your own order in first!

Hun­dreds of books about books have been pub­lished dur­ing the past cen­tury…I will not claim that this one is the very best of all time. Yet The Book is possibly the best of our time.

Image courtesy of Jason Booher.

Alternatively, why not go old school and pick up a copy of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks? Although it was based on material from this site, it is greatly expanded and covers symbols that have been only tangentially explored here, such as quotation marks, dashes, hyphens, asterisks and daggers. It was a lot of fun to write, and I did my best to make it an enjoyable read too.

So: that’s it from me for 2017. As ever, thank you all for continuing to visit, comment, and email! Enjoy the holiday season and the New Year that follows it, and see you all in 2018!

“An ivory what?” you may well ask. In the process of researching and writing The Book (which is, need I say, available from all good bookshops), I came across any number of tidbits that lay just fractionally below the interesting-ness threshold required for inclusion in the book. One discovery in particular, though, has had me kicking myself since I first handed in the manuscript back in 2015, and I still wish I’d found a way to incorporate it into the narrative. Here it is!

Writing media have always been defined by a tension between cost, quality and utility. In ancient China, for example, writers had to choose between tall, narrow strips of bamboo or larger sheets of silk as their writing medium.1 Bamboo was cheap and plentiful and, strung into mats unrolled from right to left, it was the driving force behind the East Asian convention of writing text from top to bottom rather than left to right. Its principal drawback was that it was also very heavy. A learned Chinese reader was said to have read many cartloads of books, emphasising their weight rather than their quantity.2 Featherweight silk, on the other hand, was expensive to buy but exquisite to write upon, and was preferred for elaborate illustrations or important documents.3 (Paper, when it arrived, split the difference between the two, but that’s another story.)

The Greco-Roman experience was similar. Though the conventional view of an ancient scribe is of a writer toiling over an unrolled papyrus scroll, papyrus was neither versatile nor robust enough for everyday use: it was fragile, sometimes wearing away against a reader or writer’s clothes, and it required a flat surface on which to write.4,5 The average Roman-about-town relied instead on a diptych, or writing tablet, fashioned from a pair of hinged pieces of wood hollowed out to hold a thin layer of beeswax, in which they wrote with a simple pointed stylus. Back at home, their notes could be copied onto papyrus for safekeeping and then erased from their diptych with the other end of the stylus, which was flattened like a spatula for just that purpose.5 Like the ancient Chinese, the Romans had to choose between strong and delicate, cheap and expensive, portable and static.

What does this have to do with Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and third President of the United States of America, and what was his ivory “polyptych”? The clue is in the name. In a general sense, diptych means “folded in two”, but for the Greeks it carried the specific connotation of a folding, two-part writing tablet. (Today it is more often applied to bipartite paintings such as altarpieces.)6Triptych means “threefold” and polyptych, by extension, “manifold”. An ivory polyptych, then, is an ivory notebook of many pages — and that is exactly what Jefferson used each day to record temperature, wind direction, weather, bird migrations and many other indicators of the climate and season.

Jefferson was following a long-held tradition. Portable, erasable writing tablets continued to be used from Roman times onward (there’s a particularly fine medieval example shown here, barely a few inches on a side), while ivory notebooks in particular became fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries. Robert Payton, late of the Museum of London, and who kindly provided the image of the Uluburun writing set above, told me that they were popular with ladies of a certain station in life:

Ladies visiting each other used to keep notes on very small ivory tablets well into the beginning of the 20th century; similar tablets were also used by ladies to mark down dancing partners at formal dances in the 19th century.

Miss Havisham of Dickens’ Great Expectations was one such 19th century lady. Seeking to write an IOU of sorts,

She took from her pocket a yellow set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished gold, and wrote upon them with a pencil in a case of tarnished gold that hung from her neck.

The compact, reusable nature of an ivory notebook would have suited Jefferson down to the ground. Obsessive as he was about his daily observations — his house at Monticello bore a weathervane connected to a compass rose on the ceiling of one of its porticoes, and his pockets were weighed down with gadgets such as a thermometer, a compass, a spirit level and a globe — his ivory polyptych let him take notes with a pencil throughout the day before later copying them onto a more permanent medium.7 His daily routine, in other words, was not so different from that of a literate Greek or Roman. And though it may be stretching the analogy just a bit, if we consider that today many of us make ephemeral notes on our smartphones and (ahem) our tablets before sorting through them at a later time, we too are walking in the footsteps of our ancestors. Writing technologies change over time; people, not so much.

Many thanks to Rob Payton and to Chad Wollerton of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation for their help with this post.

On Monday 11th September I gave a talk at Southampton University for the 2017 edition of a yearly symposium called “The Future of Text”. I’ve known Frode Hegland, its organiser, for a few years now (we first corresponded back in 2014, as I was finishing the manuscript for The Book, and he’s a fellow immigrant here in South London) but I must confess to having been a terrible conference tease. Each time he has asked me to participate, I’ve made positive noises and then subsequently had to back out because of one thing or another.

Finally, though, the stars aligned and this year I was able to attend. I’m glad I did! Frode’s focus, and that of the conference itself, is the concept of hypertext — how we can and do use computers to break up texts and recombine them in ad hoc and surprising ways. Hypertext, or at least the concept of it, has been around for some time now: Vannevar Bush first speculated about it in 1945 for The Atlantic1; Ted Nelson gave it a name in 19652 and Doug Engelbart demonstrated it in the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968.3 Most recently, of course, Tim Berners-Lee gave hypertext a home in 1989 in the form of the World Wide Web.4

Despite this long history, the feeling that I got from my fellow presenters at The Future of Text is that there is still a lot to be learned. For my part, I had little to nothing constructive to add about the future of text and so I went off script and talked about the past instead. (No-one seemed to mind!) Specifically, I ran through the history of the book from cuneiform tablet to double-cord–bound books in ten minutes flat plus five for questions,* then gratefully took my seat to listen to far more qualified people talk about where the written word might be going in the future.

Remember the interrobang‽ Of course you do! That’s the kind of rhetorical question for which the interrobang is perfectly suited. I’ve been thinking about Martin K. Speckter’s punctuation mark of late for a couple of reasons: first, a Google alert turned up an obituary of a Minnesotan poet named J. Otis Powell‽. I hadn’t known of Powell‽ previously — I’d have loved to have been able to ask him about his surname! — but Minnpost explains his unusual name as follows:

Powell‽ once signed his own name with an exclamation point. Sometime in the 2010s, he changed that to an interrobang, a nonstandard punctuation mark that combines a question mark with an exclamation point. [When] asked about the change, Powell‽ said, “The exclamation point was too didactic. I’m at a point in my life now where even if I’m passionate and committed to something, there’s still that question, because I learn how much I don’t know every time I learn anything.”

Getting an ampersand tattoo is one thing; changing one’s name to include an interrobang is quite another.

Separately, I recently came across the website for a London-based architecture and engineering firm named Interrobang, and, although their name isn’t especially unusual, the way they present their logo very much is — it is an interrobang unlike any other I’ve seen so far.

This prompted me look at the interrobang itself in more detail. Of all the recently invented marks of punctuation, it is arguably the most successful and the most difficult to design. I count at least four separate approaches to its visual design, and, as such, I thought it was time to lay them out and perhaps even to start closing in on a canonical form. And so here we are: please read on for my tentative taxonomy of interrobangs.

Closed interrobang

Though Martin K. Speckter invented the interrobang, he did not design it. That was left to Jack Lipton, his agency’s design director. Lipton (and, in fact, a number of other interested parties) furnished Speckter with a series of potential interrobang designs, of which a few were published in Speckter’s type-in-advertising magazine, Type Talks. Here are some of Lipton’s proposals:

The design shown here in the middle was the one that stuck, if in the less sinuous form seen below. Its distinguishing feature is that the ascenders* of its constituent question and exclamation marks overlap to form a closed counter (or, in Lipton’s design, counters plural) and, as such, I’m calling this the “closed” interrobang.

“Closed” interrobangs, all set at 72 pt. From left to right: Calibri; Arial Unicode MS; Consolas; and Segoe UI Semilight. Microsoft likes this style of interrobang, it seems.

Open interrobang

Next comes the converse: the “open” interrobang. This style also arrived early in the form of the interrobang that accompanied Richard Isbell’s 1966–1967 typeface Americana. The distinguishing characteristic here is that the ascenders of the question and exclamation mark are joined at the bottom but do not form a closed counter, hence the name.

Disjoint interrobang

Christian Schwartz’s “disjoint” interrobang, as featured in his Amplitude typeface. (Image courtesy of Stephen Coles on Flickr.)

If the closed and open interrobangs have in common a single conjoined stroke, the “disjoint” interrobang diverges by possessing two separate ascenders — as if its constituent question and exclamation marks share a terminal dot but can’t otherwise bear to touch.

I haven’t seen many disjoint interrobangs, but the most distinctive and well-executed are those in Christian Schwartz’s Amplitude and Fritz.

Hybrid interrobang

Lastly, on to the reason for this post! As I mentioned above, I was intrigued by the interrobang used in the logo of Interrobang London. I asked Maria Smith of Interrobang to tell me more, and this is what she said:

We’re architects and engineers working together so we wanted a name that spoke to this cross fertilisation. The interrobang seemed perfect as it combines the expression of architects and exclamation marks, with the interrogating nature of engineers and question marks.

The design was a collaboration between myself and graphic designers Polimekanos.

We wanted to create a new one because while we loved the meaning, we couldn’t find an existing one that really satisfied us in terms of its composition. I suppose we also wanted our very own! The starting point was Didot because that was the heading font for the engineering company we’re a part of: Webb Yates Engineers.

You can see the result here, featuring a single “hybrid” stroke that combines aspects of both the question and exclamation marks. I like it! It’s less dense than the closed variant and, dare I say, less fussy than the disjoint and open varieties.

So: there you have it. What do you think? Is it reasonable to categorise extant typographic interrobangs as open, closed, disjoint or hybrid? Have I missed a category, or are my names in need of some finessing? And, most importantly, which is your favourite? Let me know in the comments!

*

Ascender or stem? I’m not sure how to refer to the main stroke in the exclamation and question marks respectively. Answers in the comments, please! ↩︎